Displacement #3: Itinera as Code

By Vibeka McGyver

My introduction to Itinera began when I was a first-year computer science student and had the opportunity to work on a long-term project focused on updating Itinera’s “Travelers” visualization. The Travelers visualization was initially very intimidating to me. I was not familiar with the historical aspect of the data, and I had no idea how the code worked. Over the past four semesters of working on Itinera as a student, I have had many new and important learning experiences. This project has increased my understanding of how to work with data, specifically unfamiliar data. I have also had the experience of working in a computer lab environment with a team of people who are all engaged with different parts of the same project. In the lab, I have learned the value of having an understanding of everyone else’s contributions, processes, and goals. Over this time, I have also developed a better understanding of the value of Computer Science in combination with Art History and other disciplines. The process of teaching myself a new programming style has also resulted in a fair deal of trial and error, which has frequently led me into and out of rabbit holes. I can now better distinguish these rabbit holesRabbit Holes
The concept of research "rabbit holes," or the feeling that you have entered a bewilderingly large and complex array of new concepts and understandings, is one that has come up consistently throughout the process of creating this roundtable for Journal18. Each of us has experienced the feeling of opening the door onto a new idea, and falling down into a state of deep insecurity. If one spends enough time persevering in a research rabbit hole, however, soon patterns begin to appear, light begins to dawn, and real, hard-earned learning occurs. They become much less frightening—but no less elucidating—with time and experience. and climb out of them more quickly than I could in the beginning. I have learned the value of what a data visualization can offer to students, researchers, and anyone curious about data relationships. Working on Itinera has been a very informative, yet challenging, opportunity, which allowed me to experiment with different approaches.

In the beginning, I did not know where to start,Learning to Code in the Digital Humanities
The process of working mindfully with digital computing sits at the heart of Itinera as it is enacted within the Visual Media Workshop. Why we are using computing to get at our interpretations is as important as the individual effectiveness of our techniques. From a traditional computer science point-of-view, learning the "grammar" of computing often precedes the functional experience of using this tool in a context important to the student. In the VMW, we try to provide real-world experience for students to work with, through, and around digital computers, focusing more on their acquisition of a sense of self-sufficiency than on individual tasks completed, data entered, or lines of code written. For more thoughts on this approach, please see, David Birnbaum and Alison Langmead. “Task-Driven Programming Pedagogy in the Digital Humanities,” in New Directions for Computing Education: Embedding Computing across Disciplines, edited by Samuel B. Fee, Amanda M. Holland-Minkley, and Tom Lombardi (New York: Springer, 2017), 63-85. so one of Alison’s lab project managers, S.E. Hackney, helped guide me through the initial steps. The first step was to increase my familiarity with Itinera’s current functionality. The best way to do this was to spend time looking at the functionality of the JavaScript visualization from the front end. For reference, the back end of the Itinera code (the code that runs the visualization) was not a part of my learning experience until three semesters later. Instead I began learning by simply interacting with the current Travelers visualization (Figure 1), starting by selecting an agent from the red index tab located at the top right of the visualization. The green box on the right of the screen provides information about the selected agent, such as the name, an image, and life achievements. The surrounding blue dots and corresponding names represent other agents, related to the central agent. To change the central agent, the user can either select a new agent by clicking another blue dot on the visualization, or choose a different name from the index. Then, the new selected agent will appear in red at the center, surrounded by his or her social relationships.

By familiarizing myself with the basics of Itinera, how the current visualization performs and how the data is presented, I was provided with an incredibly important foundation. Just by clicking through the visualization, I was able to recognize patterns and form an idea of how the code might work. This was a small but important first move because I was able to compose my own understanding before being overwhelmed by completely new and unfamiliar code. I was also able to develop ideas about how to critically approach a more informative visualization in the future.

One part of the visualization that initially confused me was the cloud of unfamiliar names. Clicking on any name would produce another cloud of unfamiliar names. I was very concerned that it would be difficult to work on the code without also being familiar with eighteenth-century history. After four semesters of seeing the same names, I eventually created my own understanding of the relationships and agents in Itinera. Although I don’t have the same level of historically based understanding of these names as the project managers do, repetition and curiosity have led me to form my own connections and understandings about the data. Similar roadblocks have appeared throughout my work on the project. It takes effort to recognize these roadblocks and remind myself that I cannot let them stop my productivity. It is much more productive to consider what I do know, rather than what I do not. I may not understand the complete history of these names, families, and relationships, but the purpose of being able to code is to use a computer to assist in developing such an understanding. Many times, I’ve had to refocus myself on the small steps that are the foundation for taking bigger steps.

One of my major goals is to make the template function properly, relying on other online examples, including those presented in tutorials. Yet, these models have limited use because they all rely upon small and pre-formatted amounts of data, already structured to work perfectly with the sample visualization code. Itinera’s data is formatted in a much more complex way. There have been many times that I found it difficult to understand how to proceed with such large amounts of data. Although there are still obstacles, I am approaching a point where I can begin to understand the appropriate process. The feeling of being stuck, especially with the large amount of resources online, has been challenging. I have tried to escape rabbit holes by breaking the code down, line by line. Reading lines of code like paragraphs in a book does not always work in an expected way due to the overwhelming amount of information. Instead, reading each word and connecting it with a meaning has been a more productive route of working through problems.



Aside from the code, I have learned to represent the data that my colleagues have spent a long time gathering and researching accurately and informatively. Working on Itinera has helped me understand how very different disciplines can successfully work together. Art History, Digital Media, and Computer and Data Sciences are incredibly interesting when combined into a single project, such as Itinera, and develop the potential to provide new and complex understandings to historical processes.

Cite this page as: Vibeka McGyver, "Displacement #3: Itinera as Code," in “Itinera’s Displacements: A Roundtable,” Journal18, Issue 5 Coordinates (Spring 2018), http://www.journal18.org/2741​

Header:
Robineau’s network visualization, generated by Itinera.
Screenshot by Nancy Um, modified in Adobe Illustrator, 2018. 

Framing #2: Itinera as Classroom

By Alison Langmead

Upon visiting Itinera at http://itinera.pitt.edu, one might be inclined to think of it as a “digital humanities project” or a “historical visualization project,” and of course this assumption would not be wrong. I have spent many an hour designing, revising, and working on this public-facing side of the project in collaboration with Whirl-i-Gig, the team behind CollectiveAccess, Itinera’s software infrastructure. But the web-facing interface to Itinera is only one component of this multi-faceted project, although an important one to be sure. 

As the project’s technical director, I have been responsible for the customizations of the site’s back end as well, from the data model that structures the historical information, to the format of the entry forms we use to record our data. Even above and beyond the material affordances of Itinera, the project also has a series of social affordances, such as workflows and best practices, that the team has shepherded over the years, almost all of which can now be found on the project’s “Guide” site found at https://sites.haa.pitt.edu/itineraguide/.

When I think about Itinera, however, I do not think of it as a website, or even as a digital humanities project. I think of it as a classroom.

Itinera is a place—an environment—where I mentor, am mentored by, and learn alongside a team of fellow inquirers, collaborating on the process of thinking deeply about the past, and engaging with robust scholarly methods for interpreting historical source material. By thinking of Itinera as a classroom, I see it as but one example of the ways that digital computing can be used mindfully to structure how we think about the past. It is not an end-all-be-all for studying culturally-motivated travel in the 18th and 19th centuries, instead, it is a focused environment designed to incite the possibility of exploring the past. Like a classroom, it is also never “done” or “complete.” Writing about the experience of interacting with Itinera, as we are all doing here in this roundtable, serves as a wonderful opportunity to create a touchstone for a moment in the project's history, but such essays will never serve as its sole, end goal.

Itinera, like those of us who work on it, is always in a state of constant becoming, changing in response to internal and external needs and conditions. Each year, a new project manager joins the team. This leader is drawn from the cohort of PhD students within the Department of History of Art and Architecture, and, so far, they have all proactively requested the position. Each year, the project manager has had a different research interest as well as a personalized set of learning goals for his or her time here in the Visual Media Workshop. These variations always set a different tone for the project, encouraging Itinera to grow, evolve, and adapt to the current needs of its team. Thinking about, learning about, and even entering data into Itinera is a practice that each person takes to differently, as demonstrated by the various displacements included in this roundtable. For some, the process of data entry asks them to slow down and think about every sentence in their primary source material, looking for how the puzzle pieces of the past might productively fit together. For others, the work of structuring historical data asks them to think differently about their own methodological habits and patterns. It is impossible for me to predict—even if I wanted to—what shape Itinera will take year upon year.

And, it is not only at the project management level that Itinera changes over time. Each year, a different group of undergraduates becomes involved in the project. The project managers, my colleague Drew Armstrong, and I all work together to mentor these fellow inquirers as they learn not only about ways that digital computing can be used to think through and produce new historical narratives, but also, more fundamentally, about the process of doing history itselfLearning to Code in the Digital Humanities
The process of working mindfully with digital computing sits at the heart of Itinera as it is enacted within the Visual Media Workshop. Why we are using computing to get at our interpretations is as important as the individual effectiveness of our techniques. From a traditional computer science point-of-view, learning the "grammar" of computing often precedes the functional experience of using this tool in a context important to the student. In the VMW, we try to provide real-world experience for students to work with, through, and around digital computers, focusing more on their acquisition of a sense of self-sufficiency than on individual tasks completed, data entered, or lines of code written. For more thoughts on this approach, please see, David Birnbaum and Alison Langmead. “Task-Driven Programming Pedagogy in the Digital Humanities,” in New Directions for Computing Education: Embedding Computing across Disciplines, edited by Samuel B. Fee, Amanda M. Holland-Minkley, and Tom Lombardi (New York: Springer, 2017), 63-85.. Some of these undergraduates come from the Department of History of Art and Architecture, but because we are affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh’s First Experiences in Research Program, many of them come from departments scattered across our Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, such as Neuroscience or French and Italian Languages and Literatures. Vibeka McGyver, whose experience is recounted amongst these reconfigurations, comes from the Department of Computer Science. The ever-changing and transdisciplinary nature of the entire project team lends depth and strength to all of our engagements with Itinera.

We proactively designed the “Routes” interface for Itinera without any lines connecting the dots that represent the life eventsLife Events and Tour Stops
Sometimes we talk about Itinera as a re-envisioning of the traditional linear narrative that has long-structured our understanding of the "Grand Tour" in Western Europe. And that was, indeed, one of the foundational concepts for the project. For this reason, we spoke of the collocation of an agent, a time, and a place as a "tour stop." Since that time, however, we have come to see that what we are producing is not the trace of one trip or one tour. Instead, we are collecting information about the trajectory of a given life. Indeed, the project team had its change of heart at a very particular moment. Karen Lue, an undergraduate research assistant at the time, looked up from her work and said, "Is baptism a tour stop?" The room quieted down, we knew we wanted to track this sort of information, and therefore we also knew our terminology needed to change. In part because of a large helping of technical debt, the back-end interface still calls these data points, "tour stops." However, nowadays, when we speak of these events within the Visual Media Workshop, we make an effort to call them "life events," whether we are talking about people, objects, or sites.. Straight lines suggest neat narratives. But if working on this project over the years has demonstrated anything to me, it is that neat narratives are no more true in the present than they were in the past, and they are also not as desirable as they might first appear. Allowing for transformation and change has been hugely inspiring and educational for me, and I hope, for my fellow inquirers.

Cite this page as: Alison Langmead, "Framing #2: Itinera as Classroom," in “Itinera’s Displacements: A Roundtable,” Journal18, Issue 5 Coordinates (Spring 2018), http://www.journal18.org/2741​

Header:
Henry Clay Frick Fine Arts Building, University of Pittsburgh.
Photo: Alison Langmead, 2017.